September 30, 2013

Homemade Wireless Headphone Charging Station

In this post I will show you how I enhanced my wireless headset from cable bound charging to wireless charging!

Click here, read the whole post and watch the video!Being tired of allways having to plug in my headphones for charging I came up with a solution that also enabled me to test lasercutting and heatbending as new building method.First of all I needed a cheap 5V charging coil - I found this set on www.dx.com for about 9€:

It consists of two copper coils with little circuit boards. The coil at the top is the emitter coil. It emits an alternating magnetic field. That field induces a current in the charging coil at the bottom. A rectifier and some more microchips provide an useful 5V DC output, just what my headset's USB based charging port needs. The emitter coil works on 5-12 Volts and draws between 50-200mA. Using lasercut parts and an old mini USB plug I was able to construct a holder for the charging coil, which perfectly plugs into the headphones without restricting microphone or volume controls.

You can see how I bent the lasercut acrylic with the help of a little pocket torch in the video at the bottom of the page.After glueing and a simple paintjob it looks like this:

The next step was setting up a nice basestation to hang my headphones on to while charging. I cut a flat piece of acrylic and bent it into the desired shape using a pockettorch:

After bending it looks a lot more like a headphones stand:

Installing all the necessary electronics, like a momentary switch on top of the hanger, a status LED and the emitter coil, was not a big problem.

All in all the complete set up turned out very well.

As long as the headset is hanging on the holder, the momentary switch activates the emitter coil and status LED. The power supply is a standard 5V 300mA supply and provides enough power for the emitter coil on the left.

Here's a video that shows the kit in action as well as some more details about the construction process.